Big Science

by Michael Hiltzik

  Despite the inflow of cash and capital assets, Lawrence kept a parsimonious grip on his kingdom. The sources and volume of funding were concealed from the staff, who were under constant pressure to work frugally: one day, Jack Livingood, who came from Princeton in 1932, was instructed by Lawrence to collect the spare pieces of solder he had been routinely discarding, which prompted him to spend a full morning on his hands and knees picking up nuggets of scrap metal from the concrete floor. Don Cooksey, who settled into the role of green-eyeshaded keeper of the lab budget, was known to conduct hourlong inquiries over such matters as which heavy-duty battery to purchase, a decision in which the expenditure of a single dollar might be at stake.

  As was common in academia, Rad Lab researchers lived a poverty-row existence; Molly Lawrence, who considered her lifestyle “quite affluent” on Ernest’s annual salary of $5,000, was appalled to discover that Milton White was sharing a $40-a-month apartment with three other young men in order to stretch the $600 he received as a one-year teaching fellowship. The roommates kept a stewpot simmering perpetually on the stove, tossing in a scrounged vegetable when they had it or a scrap of meat when flush, and squabbling over spare potatoes. So every Monday night before Journal Club, Molly invited members of the penurious staff for dinner (on a rotating schedule), serving a standard menu of roast beef and potato, salad, and apple pie. The staff’s living standards would improve in time, but not until the appearance on the scene of an especially well-heeled patron, the United States government.

  It was during this period that Ernest acquired the reputation of a relentless taskmaster in command of a growing brigade; the recurring term in personal reminiscences of the Rad Lab is “slave driver.” Those who were entranced by his energy and vision thrived under the pressure; everyone else could only submit and simmer—or go. At home Ernest kept his bedside radio tuned to the frequency of the oscillator, which was so poorly shielded that its interference easily reached the quarter mile or so to his home; if it fell silent for even a few minutes, he would be on the phone to the lab—or even materialize in person—demanding to know whether the machine was out of commission or simply had been left unattended while the late shift slipped out for a beer. Molly became accustomed to having their Friday-evening movie dates hijacked by the machine. The first time, Ernest said casually as they left the house, “Do you mind if I drop by the lab to see how the boys are doing?”

  “Of course,” she remembered later, “the boys weren’t doing so hot; there was another of those pesky leaks in the vacuum, and we never did get to the Paramount. Finally, I found an old chair in the corner and sat down.”

  There would be many evenings like that. But Molly, as the daughter of a physician, understood that she was witnessing the birth of team science; a new paradigm of a research lab. “There appeared to be no ‘pecking order,’ nobody really in command—not even Stan Livingston, the pioneer member of the crew and undoubtedly the most experienced operator,” she recalled. “Every one of the five or six men present, including Ernest, was busy getting his hands and his lab coat dirty. Every now and again they would go into a huddle, like a football team, to call the signals for the next play. But every man was a quarterback; a suggestion from the newest and youngest recruit would be considered and acted upon with as much respect as one proposed by Stan or Ernest. The whole scene was a far cry from my idea of scientific research.”

  This egalitarian atmosphere helped to moderate the demanding routine of the average Rad Lab staff member. So too did Lawrence’s bracing personality. “He was warm and friendly, and he had a feeling of drive and latent accomplishment I’ve never seen anywhere else,” recalled Malcolm Henderson. The son of a Yale Medical School professor, Henderson had grown up with the Blumer girls and earned his doctorate at the Cavendish before joining the Rad Lab in 1932.

  Ernest’s imperturbable demeanor completed the picture. Displays of temper were almost unheard of; no utterances of profanity are recorded in the extensive recollections of his students and colleagues. A very large frustration—the failure of the machine during the visit of an important donor, for example—was required to provoke him to a maximal “Oh, sugar!”

  • • •

  After his return from the East Coast with his bride, and the completed installation in the new Rad Lab of the magnet and vacuum chamber for the twenty-seven-inch machine, Ernest began to leave a larger share of the manual work to his grad students. A few months earlier, while still a bachelor, he had described his routine as “working day and night with Livingston and Brady on our big magnet and associated apparatus,” and confessed to having “neglected everything else, even my fiancée.” Now married life prompted him to place a higher value on his free time from fund-raising and managing the lab. Sundays customarily meant a competitive game of tennis. “He’d come in, and the machine would be busted on a Sunday morning,” recalled Livingood, “and he’d say, ‘Well, I’m going out to play tennis, and you people have to fix it.’ ”

  Yet under his leadership, the lab was coalescing into a unit. There were shared trips to Yosemite National Park or down to the shore at Carmel, sometimes in Lawrence’s sedan, graciously loaned out if he was staying home. The entire lab convened monthly for staff dinners at DiBiasi’s, an eatery just over the Berkeley city line where the food was of middling quality but tolerance high for a boisterous group that grew larger with every appearance. The lab itself was always bustling: David Sloan’s X-ray tube working in one room, a linear accelerator in another, and in a third room the proton accelerator—which by 1935 was commonly referred to as the cyclotron, in what Ernest described as “a sort of laboratory slang.” (By 1939, the name was official enough to be used in the citation for Lawrence’s Nobel Prize.) But the quirkiness of the machinery produced a lot of downtime. “Everyone had to wait for sufficient vacuum in the cyclotron tank,” recalled Henderson, whose own peculiar mode of relaxation was to play the bagpipes. “If it were nice weather, then there might be touch football outside or time for a run over to the Faculty Club for billiards or pool.” Yet once there was work to do, the horseplay stopped.

  One thing that did not change was the lab’s slapdash approach to scientific procedure, including safety procedure. For scientists who should have been familiar with the behavior of high-tension electrical fields and with the possible effects of radioactivity on living tissue, the staff worked with surprising carelessness while in close proximity to these unforgiving physical phenomena.

  Jack Livingood had the closest call. One morning in 1934, he was perched atop a ladder, testing the electrical tuning coil of Sloan’s X-ray machine by poking at it with a wooden yardstick fitted with a nail at the end. It was routine procedure for the X-ray team, but this time a crackling spark jumped from the coil to the stick, sending 16,000 volts into Livingood’s thumb, through his body, and out to the ground through the nails in his shoes. He was jolted off the ladder onto the concrete floor, where he lay writhing on his back.

  Malcolm Henderson, working on the cyclotron in the next room, was used to hearing the X-ray workers shout to make themselves heard over the thrum of the tube’s oscillator. This time the sound had “a different color,” alarming enough to bring him running. He saw the prostrate Livingood surrounded by a crowd that included a dumbfounded and fretful Ernest Lawrence. A doctor’s son, Henderson checked Livingood’s pulse and packed him into a car for a trip to the hospital. Livingood stayed there for ten days, recovering from severe burns on his hands and the soles of his feet.

  Ernest was severely rattled, reporting to Cooksey that he had been certain that Livingood was “a goner.” He hoped the experience would “impress the fellows with the ever-present dangers of the high-voltage equipment,” but allowed that “it isn’t practical to make the equipment foolproof when it is being rapidly altered and the only procedure is one of intelligent caution.” He claimed to have consistently warned the staff of the danger—“so much so that I see myself as an ‘old crab,’ but now maybe warnings will
be given more respect.” The truth, of course, was that any warnings he may have issued about the dangers of the lab’s physical environment were drowned out by his endless demands and tight deadlines for improvements to the machine.

  The staff’s indifference to the energy fields produced by the cyclotron and X-ray tube was even more remarkable. They took only minimal precautions against the copious alpha and gamma rays emitted by the equipment; David Sloan enveloped part of his X-ray tube in thin sheets of lead, but the ease with which its rays penetrated the shield was interpreted as a gratifying sign of the tube’s great efficiency rather than as a reminder of its dangers. The effect of radioactivity on health was hardly unknown—not least because of widespread press coverage of the poisoning of working women at U.S. Radium Corporation in the 1920s. The workers, who marked watch dials with luminous radium paint, customarily licked their brushes to a fine point, ingesting the radioactive substance. The interest shown in the Sloan apparatus by medical researchers in San Francisco and New York arose, after all, because X-rays were known to destroy cancer cells, as long as they could be focused precisely enough to leave normal cells unharmed.

  These issues were typically treated with graveyard humor in the Rad Lab. Molly Lawrence tried to remain silent about her own fears—one of the guests at her own wedding, a physicist named Joe Morris, had arrived with his hand enveloped in a black glove to conceal radiation burns—until the night a breakthrough with the Sloan tube kept Ernest out until after three in the morning. Unable to reach him by phone and confined at home because Ernest had the car, she let her imagination magnify “all the horror stories about what excess radiation might do to the men.” When her husband arrived home, she met him at the door and demanded, “Are we going to have a family or aren’t we?” Her fears were not fully assuaged until she became pregnant early in the new year and delivered a healthy boy, John Eric Lawrence, in mid-October. There would be five more Lawrences, all perfectly healthy at birth.

  The men continued to work heedlessly in a miasma of radioactive emissions, including neutrons, which Lawrence recognized as especially active on human tissue. “We have been giving ourselves undesirably great exposure to the neutrons,” he informed Cockcroft in 1935, acknowledging that the Rad Lab had determined that the particles “are about ten times as lethal as X-rays” and that he had decided to move the cyclotron’s control panel “further from the magnet with suitable material interposed.” The “material” was cans of water.

  The staff’s insouciance may have reflected the infrequency of acute injuries. A researcher occasionally might be winged by a metal tool sent airborne by the magnet’s powerful field—one piece of flying shrapnel even nipped off the end of Ernest’s finger—but more serious physical effects remained latent, not to emerge until many years later, when exposure to Rad Lab equipment was impossible to pinpoint as the cause. Thus when Dean Cowie, who had arrived at the Rad Lab as a twenty-year-old graduate student in 1935, developed cataracts at the alarmingly young age of thirty-two, there was no way to determine if the condition resulted from his frequently scrutinizing the Berkeley cyclotron’s beam with the naked eye; or from his later cyclotron work with Merle Tuve at the Carnegie Institution of Washington; or even from an undiagnosed predisposition to eye disease. His Rad Lab colleagues could only say that they recalled Cowie as “neither particularly careful nor careless, but just average.” The cost of operations to restore Cowie’s eyesight was eventually covered by the Carnegie Institution.

  • • •

  In assembling his staff, Lawrence was organically developing a new paradigm of the research lab, compounded from his insatiable demand for brainpower and manpower, and his willingness to employ anyone, no matter his formal scientific discipline, who might be willing to keep the accelerator running.

  Some of his new employees were distinctly oddballs for an academic laboratory. One was Commander Telesio Lucci, a courtly fifty-six-year-old who owed his title to service in the pre-Mussolini Italian navy. Lucci had come to America to serve his nation as a consular officer in Pittsburgh (among other postings), and presently fetched up in Berkeley with his American wife, Winifred. An amiable gentleman with an endless store of personal tall tales and a vehement hatred for Il Duce that he would happily air at the slightest prompting, he was serving Leonard Loeb as a general dogsbody when he became enthralled by the goings-on at the Rad Lab and offered his services as a spare pair of hands for free, which Ernest considered an irresistible price. Lucci was adept with a screwdriver but innocent of any physics knowledge; his particular pleasure was to throw the heavy knife switch that turned on the accelerator, an operation that delivered an electrical surge occasionally strong enough to knock out power to the lab, the campus, or even to the entire city of Berkeley. Convinced that the problem was a too-abrupt closing of the circuit, Lucci would move the switch with elaborate delicacy, to the amusement of his colleagues.

  But it was the presence of scientists from outside physics that marked the real departure from custom. Like most other major universities, Berkeley tended to think of chemists, biologists, physicists, and engineers all as inhabitants of discrete sandboxes. That began to change as Lawrence embraced these strangers within the Rad Lab. To a great extent, the outreach was dictated by necessity. James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron in early 1932 posed questions about atomic structure and behavior that could not be fully processed without an understanding of chemistry in addition to physics. As for the biological sciences, it was an inescapable fact that research foundations were far more eager to fund medical studies than basic scientific research; this was demonstrated to Lawrence by the interest shown in Sloan’s X-ray tube by two major cancer research institutions: Columbia University’s Institute of Cancer Research and Berkeley’s own medical school, located across the bay in San Francisco. Financial backers of both institutions—the Chemical Foundation in Columbia’s case and William Crocker, a banking and railroad magnate, in Berkeley’s case—seemed eager to pony up funds to cover Sloan’s further research. How eager was demonstrated by Crocker during a visit to the Rad Lab. A regent of the University of California, Crocker had offered $12,000 to fund Lawrence’s construction of a Sloan tube for the medical school. But the tube failed on the day that Crocker came out to the Rad Lab to see it in action. (“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Ernest exclaimed.) As a substitute demonstration, Ernest ordered the device to be dismantled so he could explain the function of each part to the wealthy donor. Crocker got the point. “How much is needed to make it work?” he asked.

  Lawrence had spent a difficult year cadging money from philanthropists and foundations for a proton accelerator, the purpose of which had to be explained to them in the abstract terms of basic science. He was stunned by Crocker’s question, which hinted at the ease with which he could extract funds for a device with presumed, but far from certain, medical applications. His insight was reinforced by a demand from the Research Corporation’s Howard Poillon that he bring the X-ray tube to a patentable stage without delay and without disclosing his design to outsiders. “I have warned [Sloan and Lawrence] about directing the attention of others to it lest . . . the patent situation becomes very cloudy,” he informed his patent lawyer, Arthur Knight. Ernest did not object, now that the tube’s capacity to generate research funds appeared to outstrip that of the cyclotron. “I am told there is a very big market for such deep therapy outfits,” he wrote Poillon. “Go ahead as rapidly as possible with the commercial development, for I am afraid that the General Electric Company and others will be entering the field and harass our progress.”

  Crocker’s donation for the medical school project solved one of Lawrence’s immediate problems: keeping Stan Livingston on hand after the expiration of his one-year instructorship at Berkeley. Ernest simply assigned Livingston to help Sloan install the X-ray tube across the bay. In effect, Livingston was slotted into the same role on the X-ray tube that he had played on the eleven-inch and twenty-seven-inch cyclotrons. Although his salary
would be paid for the coming year from the medical school budget, he would be near enough to be summoned for work on the cyclotrons when needed.

  Livingston threw himself into his new task with characteristic single-mindedness, even training himself to operate the tube on some early patients. Many years later, he recalled his delight at having “had it running in six months and producing one-million-volt X-rays, the first in history.” He surely appreciated the assignment for another reason: it was his first chance to move out of the shadow of Ernest Lawrence.

  • • •

  Stan Livingston was one of the first scientists, though not the last, to discover that the teamwork demanded by Big Science might not suit them. Although it was not unusual for even talented scientists to become subservient to those of greater talent or stronger personality—as were the assistants, say, to Ernest Rutherford—researchers were still imbued with the self-image of “the lone scientist in pursuit of the truth.” That romantic phraseology came from Robert R. Wilson, whose preference for solitude sprang from his childhood on the Wyoming range. At the Rad Lab, Wilson contributed ingenious improvements to the cyclotron, among them a rubber gasket allowing probes to be inserted and withdrawn from the chamber without compromising the vacuum. But he bristled at subordinating his personal quest for the truth to the priorities of the group, which included, tediously, the maintenance of the machine. “As the youngest member of the laboratory, it was I who had to yield and to watch the team go its way rather than my way,” he reflected later. “It was [Lawrence] who was independent and creative. In some degree, the members of the team just carried out his ideas.” The only way he could maintain his own independence and creativity was by working very late at night, when he could have the run of a great laboratory almost to himself. After receiving his doctorate at Berkeley, Wilson fled to Princeton, which then was more accommodating to solitary inquiry in the old style.